Abstract
This research aims to understand how teachers perceive control mechanisms embedded in the educational system in Poland. In the article, we analyse teachers and school administrators’ online discussions evoked by the decision of Polish Ministry of National Education to close schools in March 2020 in order to protect teachers and students from coronavirus infection. We show that management control mechanisms are crucial in understanding teachers and school administrators’ behaviour. On the one hand, direct forms of control frustrate and demotivate teachers. On the other hand, a combination of diverse forms of control makes teachers comply and continue working despite the growing will to rebel against the system. We argue that the COVID pandemic exposed previously existing problems; therefore, the article’s findings are also applicable beyond the pandemic context.
Highlights
In this article, we focus on the response of teachers and school principals to regulations introduced by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Poland in March 2020
We discovered that management control mechanisms are crucial to understanding teachers’ and school administrators’ behaviour
In this article we argue that values internalised by teachers play a unique role as a control mechanism in our focal case
Summary
We focus on the response of teachers and school principals to regulations introduced by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Poland in March 2020. Research findings address the economic effects of the pandemic (Korzeb & Niedziółka, 2020; Roman et al, 2020) and psychological aspects of it (Debowska et al, 2020; Malesza & Kaczmarek, 2021; Moroń & Biolik-Moroń, 2021; Nowicki et al, 2020). Another set of literature deals with changes in lifestyles and everyday choices under the lockdown (Chodkiewicz et al, 2020; Sidor & Rzymski, 2020; Sułkowski & Ignatowski, 2020)
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